Well, that didn't take long. After drawing overwhelming criticism from disenchanted players for its shoddy quality and misleading marketing, Earth: 2066 has been dealt a final blow by Valve. The company is pulling the game from its early access program and offering customers who paid $19.99 for the poorly received game a full refund.

Earth: 2066 originally launched just three weeks ago. Billed as an open-world post-apocalyptic first-person game, it hit all the right notes to get gamers excited. Once the thing came out, however, it was universally panned by critics and irate players alike, many of whom took to Steam and Reddit to express their frustration not only with being mislead by the game's original promotional materials, but believing that they could trust in Valve's service itself to protect them against shelling out cash for subpar material like this.

Advertisement

Valve didn't respond to the concerns that this has raised for many gamers about the legitimacy of its Greenlight program. But a Valve representative said in the announcement that while the company allows developers to "make their own decisions about promotion, features, pricing and publication," the service "does require honesty from developers in the marketing of their games."